This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here and there in Brooke's work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. Like all young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy basis of our humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. There was never a young poet worth bread and salt who did not scrawl ribald verses in his day; we may surmise that Brooke's peers at King's would recall many vigorous stanzas that are not included in the volume at hand. The few touches that we have in this vein show a masculine fear on Brooke's part of being merely pretty in his verse. In his young thirst for reality he did not boggle at coarse figures or loathsome metaphors. Just as his poems of 1905-08 are of the cliché period where all lips are "scarlet," and lamps are "relumed," so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in the Shropshire Lad stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex images, and yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet The Hill:
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass,
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old...." "And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
—"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"
"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said:
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
—And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot but wish that the "1914" sonnets and the most perfect of the later poems had been separately issued. The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of consummate beauty, and I imagine that the little edition of "1914 and Other Poems," containing the thirty-two later poems, which was published in England and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page & Company in July, 1915, to save the American copy right, will always be more precious than the complete edition. As there were only twenty-five copies of this first American edition, it is extremely rare and will undoubtedly be sought after by collectors. But for one who is interested to trace the growth of Brooke's power, the steadying of his poetic orbit and the mounting flame of his joy in life, the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study. From the perfected brutality of Jealousy or Menelaus and Helen or A Channel Passage (these bite like Meredith) we see him passing to sonnets that taste of Shakespeare and foretell his utter mastery of the form. What could better the wit and beauty of this song:
"Oh! Love," they said, "is King of Kings,
And Triumph is his crown.
Earth fades in flame before his wings,
And Sun and Moon bow down."
But that, I knew, would never do;
And Heaven is all too high.
So whenever I meet a Queen, I said,
I will not catch her eye.
"Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they said,
"The Gift of Love is this;
A crown of thorns about thy head,
And vinegar to thy kiss!"—
But Tragedy is not for me;
And I'm content to be gay.
So whenever I spied a Tragic Lady,
I went another way.
And so I never feared to see
You wander down the street,
Or come across the fields to me
On ordinary feet.
For what they'd never told me of,
And what I never knew;
It was that all the time, my love,
Love would be merely you.
We come then to the five sonnets inspired by the War. Let us be sparing of clumsy comment. They are the living heart of young England; the throbbing soul of all that gracious manhood torn from its happy quest of Beauty and Certainty, flung unheated into the absurdities of War, and yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an answer to all its pangs of doubt. All the hot yearnings of "1905-08" and "1908-11" are gone; here is no Shropshire Lad enlisting for spite, but a joyous surrender to England of all that she had given. See his favourite metaphor (that of the swimmer) recur—what pictures it brings of "Parson's Pleasure" on the Cher and the willowy bathing pool on the Cam. How one recalls those white Greek bodies against the green!
Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping.
To those who tell us England is grown old and fat and soft, there is the answer. It is no hymn of hate that England's youth has sung, but the farewell of those who, loving life with infinite zest, have yet found in surrendering it to her the Beauty, the Certainty, yes and the Quiet, which they had sought. On those five pages are packed in simple words all the love of life, the love of woman, the love of England that make Brooke's memory sweet. Never did the sonnet speak to finer purpose. "In his hands the thing became a trumpet"—